


i just wanna be (with you)

by aknightley



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: College AU, M/M, Pining, roommates au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-01-06
Updated: 2019-01-06
Packaged: 2019-10-05 16:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,028
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17328386
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/aknightley/pseuds/aknightley
Summary: Keith hovers outside of the room, checking and double checking the number hanging in dull brass on the door. 305. He checks the slip of paper the housing authority had given him again. 305.This has to be his new room. It’s not the room he’d expected to come back to, but as he’d been told countless times already, he was honestly lucky he’d had a room to come back to at all.





	i just wanna be (with you)

**Author's Note:**

> Hey all! This was written for a secret santa a group of my friends did, and this was written for Rach, who asked for a college au with the prompt “I was abroad last semester and forgot to fill out the housing form, but your old roommate dropped out so hi, hey, how’s it going, I guess we live together now” AU." I hope you like it! 
> 
> Song is from Aly & AJ's song, "With You."

Keith hovers outside of the room, checking and double checking the number hanging in dull brass on the door.  _ 305. _ He checks the slip of paper the housing authority had given him again.  _ 305. _

This has to be his new room. It’s not the room he’d expected to come back to, but as he’d been told countless times already, he was honestly lucky he’d had a room to come back to at all. Shiro had lectured him for a solid  _ hour _ over forgetting to fill out his housing forms after living in Japan for a semester. It had nearly eclipsed the lecture he’d received for borrowing Shiro’s motorbike without permission when he’d been fourteen, although at least Adam had been present for that one, struggling to keep a straight face as Shiro had yelped out, “You got it up to  _ what _ speed?”

Still, lectures and forgetfulness aside, Keith had been assigned a room, and he’d been given a key, and he knows he’s in the right building, and he knows how to  _ read. _

But it’s hard to ignore the dry erase board with a giant, disturbingly realistic hand flipping the middle finger drawn on it. It’s been helpfully signed with a flourished “P.” Keith knows his roommate’s name is Lance, so at least his roommate probably isn’t responsible for the drawing, but he can’t help but feel like it’s pointedly aimed in his direction.

According to the hall manager who’d checked him in downstairs, Lance’s previous roommate had had some kind of meltdown and trashed most of their room before he’d been ejected from the building. So maybe it _ was _ aimed at him, like some kind of pre-emptive strike. Keith wouldn’t entirely blame him for it. Still, the drawing has unnerved him a little.

To be fair, he’s felt at odds since he stepped off the plane at LAX, so maybe this is just an excuse.

He doesn’t know if he should knock on the door or not. It’s his room, after all, (he glances at the paper again) but Lance had already been living there for an entire semester, so it was more  _ his _ room, wasn’t it? Keith chews his lip and stares up at the door a little more.

After a solid minute of more hesitation, he rolls his eyes at himself, grits his teeth and inserts his key into the lock, twisting it sharply. The door pushes open with a squeak, and Keith braces himself to come face to face with --

No one. There’s no one in the room at all, which leaves Keith feeling strangely bereft and more than a little idiotic.

One side of the room is completely bare, but the other side is full to the brim with strewn books and papers, a bunch of hair and face products lined up along the back of the desk, a jean jacket flung haphazardly across a wooden chair, a literal  _ row _ of snapbacks posed above the bed. There’s a football tucked up under the desk, scuff marks all over it, the white leather faded to a dull yellow.

A row of pictures are tacked on the wall, mostly landscapes of the beach and an unfamiliar boardwalk (in one of them, two girls in bathing suits pose in front of a glittering ocean with wide grins underneath wide-brimmed straw hats) and Keith starts to wonder, faintly horrified, if he’s rooming with a  _ frat boy. _

A  _ straight _ frat boy, considering the beautiful women in the pictures he’s got hung up, who feature in more pictures.

Keith closes his eyes and exhales, reminding himself that this is his fault, that he could have roomed with Matt again if he hadn’t been such a dumbass.  _ This is what you get _ , the Shiro voice in his head says.  _ It’s only a semester, so he probably won’t give you too much shit,  _ the Adam voice helpfully adds.

Keith only has two bags from his time in Japan, (a duffle bag and his backpack) so unpacking takes little to no time, which leaves him sitting on his stiff bed, staring around a room that doesn’t remotely feel like his own, wondering when his roommate is gonna show up and if he’s going to have to pretend to be excited to live with him for the next five months.

He pulls out the rough and worn copy of  _ Emma _ he’d been reading on the plane, thumbing through the feathered pages absently. The words won’t stick in his brain, blurring unless he focuses on them, but he doesn’t want to be caught off guard when Lance shows up, so he keeps his thumb pressed between the pages and pretends to read, glancing up at the door every so often.

Thirty minutes pass, then an hour, and before he can start to wonder if maybe something has happened to his roommate (it’s nearly  _ midnight _ on a Sunday night), the time difference finally catches up to him in one swift moment, and sucks him into a deep, dreamless sleep.

 

.

 

He wakes to the sound of the shower running. 

_ Akihito _ ? he thinks blearily, surprised that he was bothering to shower in the morning when he’d always preferred to shower at night, but then the smell of generic soap in his pillowcase registers, and he remembers that he’s back in California, that he’s not hearing his Japanese roommate, that it’s actually probably  _ Lance. _

Keith squints open an eye and glares at his alarm clock, which flashes 5:50 at him. He doesn’t have class for another three hours, and his roommate is humming in their shower before the sun is even in the sky like it isn’t the first Monday morning after winter break. His mouth feels dry and sticky, and his hair is tangled up around his head, and he just wants to bury his face in his pillow and go back to sleep again, but now that he knows his new roommate is on the other side of their bathroom door he’s well aware he won’t be able to fall asleep.

He checks his phone tiredly, responding to a message from Adam (why was  _ he _ awake at this hour? Did grad students ever sleep?) about meeting up for lunch, checking the usual news websites, scrolling through his new goodreads recommendations.

Lance takes the longest shower known to man (it’s approximately 20 minutes, but Keith can shower in five minutes flat so everything above ten minute is too long in his opinion) and then the water cuts off with a sharp squeaking noise. The humming tapers off, surprisingly clear-toned, and then the bathroom door jerks open all at once, and Keith comes face to face with his new roommate for the first time.

_ Water _ is his first thought, because there’s water dripping down Lance’s hair and lashes and down his neck, and then his second thought, even more unhelpful than the first, is --  _ legs? _

Keith drops his phone on his face and Lance yelps.

“Oh my god!” Lance says, slamming backwards into the bathroom door. “Who the fuck--”

“I live here?” Keith says, raising an eyebrow and trying for nonchalant even though his pulse is ratcheting up to heart attack level. He’s trying to avoid looking at Lance too closely while also looking unaffected by the fact that he’s standing there in a towel, but -- water. Legs.

Lance’s face does something complicated -- he’s so expressive Keith can almost track them in microexpressions, first confusion, then the realization, then the embarrassment. “Oh my god,” Lance says again, this time more of a groan that before. He clutches the towel tightly with one hand and covers his face with the other, his shoulders dropping. “ _ You’re _ Keith?”

“Lance, I presume,” Keith says, sitting up in bed properly, because apparently this is how he’s going to meet the person he’s living with now: trying to avoid staring at how hot his roommate is, and uncomfortably aware of the tangles in his hair and how he’s still wearing his jeans because he fell asleep in them.

“Yes,” Lance says a flush high on his cheekbones. “Uh. I’m gonna. Grab my clothes and change, if that’s cool.”

“Yeah,” Keith says. “I’m gonna. Make a phone call.”

“Cool,” Lance says. “Right.” He makes another weird face -- a smile, maybe, except it’s as awkward as Keith feels, and then grabs haphazardly at a pile of clothes near the foot of his bed before disappearing back into the bathroom.

Keith takes a moment to bury his face in his hands and breathe quietly until his heart calms down, then grabs his phone and walks into the hallway, making sure to close the door loudly enough Lance is sure to hear it.

He hesitates, then calls Adam, since he knows he’s actually awake at this ungodly hour.

Adam picks up almost immediately. “Is everything okay?” he asks, sounding concerned.

“Yes?” Keith replies, brow furrowing. “Why?”

“When you replied to my text earlier I figured you just happened to wake up and fall back asleep, but I can’t think of a single time you’ve  _ ever _ called me before 10 o’clock in the morning.” There’s a rustling noise on the line, and Adam, muffled, says, “Thanks Cindy.”

“Shiro said no more coffee this week,” Keith tells him, choosing to ignore the rest of his comments. He leans against the wall outside of his room and rubs tiredly at his face, thinking fondly of his bed in Japan, where Akihito never made noise before 8 in the morning and always had a pot of tea already prepared when Keith woke up.

“It’s decaf,” Adam says, sipping noisily. “I have a class to teach in like ten minutes, and I got about two hours of sleep because your brother decided he needed to study some more.”

“He’s been studying for like three weeks straight, he’s gonna be fine,” Keith says, sighing.

“I know that, and you know that, and I thinks somewhere deep down, Takashi knows that too,” Adam says, “but that didn’t stop him from pulling out his notecards and quizzing himself until four in the morning.”

“Want me to prank him for you?” Keith offers, tugging at a piece of hair and watching it curl stubbornly back into place when he lets go.

“After his test I just might take you up on that,” Adam grumbles. “But enough about the light of my sleepless life, why are you calling me this early if there’s no emergency?”

Keith glances back at his door absently, then startles as he realizes the offensive hand gesture has been wiped clean off of the whiteboard, and in its place, Lance has written “Welcome to Casa de Lance!” and drawn a small smiley face at the bottom.

Keith’s stomach does something twisty.

“My roommate woke me up,” he says, to which Adam makes a humming noise. “He seems like a morning person.”

“My condolences,” Adam says, sounding heartfelt. “But it’s only a few months, so hopefully it won’t be that bad. Maybe some of his good habits will rub off on you, and you won’t hate the morning so much.”

“Doubt it,” Keith replies dryly.

“Well other than chipper in the morning, how do you like him?”

“He’s, uh,” Keith says, trying to decide what to say.  _ Legs, _ his brain helpfully supplies, which makes him flush. “Tall?” he tries, and then immediately covers his face with his hands.

Adam is quiet for a moment, and then the smallest snicker crackles over the phone. “O- _ kay. _ ”

“Shut up,” Keith says, rolling his eyes. “You once told me you only agreed to go on a date with Shiro because he was wearing a tank top when he asked you, you aren’t allowed to say a word to me.”

“I just said okay,” Adam tells him innocently, but Keith can still hear the grin in his voice. “I guess at least the view in your new room will be better than living with Matt, huh?”

“Ugh, I’m hanging up on you,” Keith announces, which makes Adam laugh again.

“Don’t forget to meet me at Shiloh for lunch,” Adam reminds him, shuffling the phone around. The sound of chattering students grows louder for a moment, then dims.

“Try not to fall asleep in front of three hundred freshmen,” Keith shoots back, grinning when Adam doesn’t even bother to respond and just hangs up the call.

His good mood lingers for a moment as he stares idly at his phone, then dissolves when he remembers why he was out here in the first place.

He feels a sense of deja vu, staring up at the door again and wondering if it’s safe to go inside, but he makes himself get over it and pushes it open just as Lance is slinging a backpack over his shoulder.

He still looks good (if by good he meant  _ ridiculously cute _ , Keith’s mind helpfully supplies), his hair fluffed up and styled neatly, a long-sleeved shirt tucked loosely into his jeans. He doesn’t  _ look _ like a fratboy like this; as Lance slides a pair of glasses onto his face, he looks more like every hot guy Keith’s ever stared at in a coffee house or across the library.

Keith’s gaze slides over to the snapbacks, assessing.

“I’m so sorry again about waking you up,” Lance says, and his brow creases in what looks like genuine apology. “I knew you were coming this week, but I could have sworn the email our RA sent said you wouldn’t be here until today.”

“It’s no big deal,” Keith says, shrugging his shoulder, narrowing his eyes at the grinning girls in the photo, trying to decide if they only look like they’re related to Lance because he hopes they are.

Lance hefts his bag up higher on his shoulder, then says, “How about I make it up to you with dinner and we can get to know each other?”

“Uh,” Keith says, looking sharply back at Lance, “yeah, that sounds good.”

“Where do you wanna meet up?” Lance asks, slipping his feet into his shoes in one practiced movement. He moves around the room without pausing, and as Keith watches him he slowly starts to realize that the chaos of Lance’s side of the room is, somehow, organized into a flowing pattern that Lance effortlessly follows until he’s at the door, standing next to Keith with his backpack on, a scarf wrapped around his neck, his phone neatly tucked into his back pocket.

“I haven’t been here since last spring, so you can choose,” Keith offers.

“There’s an Indian place on the corner of Maple and Yates that has really good naan and food that basically covers the whole spectrum of spiciness, from ‘You could feed this to your grandma’ all the way to ‘Have 911 on call,’ so I think we can find something for you there,” Lance says, a smile creasing the corner of his mouth.

Keith finds himself smiling back easily. “Yeah, that sounds good.”

“Here, let me put my number in your phone so you can reach me if you need to,” Lance says, holding out his hand, and Keith hands over his phone almost automatically. Lance taps quickly, leaning back to take a cheesy picture with a peace sign, then hands the phone back to Keith. “I’ve got a yoga class first thing this morning, so I’ve gotta go, but I’ll see you later, Keith.”

“See you,” Keith says, watching as Lance slips out of the door and closes it gently behind him. He stares a little longer, then looks down at his phone, where Lance has programmed his name as ‘Best Roomie Ever.’

_ Yoga class _ , Keith’s brain repeats.  _ Legs. _

“Oh my god,” Keith mutters, and face plants onto his bed, hoping he somehow smothers himself.

 

.

 

Lance is already at the restaurant when Keith arrives, exhausted from a long day of classes. He helpfully waves from the table he’s seated at when Keith walks through the door, and Keith gratefully collapses into the booth as soon as he’s close enough.

“Long day?” Lance asks, raising a brow.

“I’ve got a lot of math courses this semester,” Keith replies, slumping back against the seat. “I really hate math.”

“What’s your major?” Lance asks, leaning forward and tilting his head.

Keith looks at him for the first time properly, realizing that he’s shed his jacket and glasses. He looks soft and rumpled, the light from the lamp above them casting a golden glow over his hair and face. 

He can see now that Lance has blue eyes. They’re the color of a clear sky on a sunny day.

Keith’s stomach twists again.

“Double major in English Lit and Art History,” Keith says, sitting up straight again and leaning forward. “What about you?”

“Education and Latin American studies,” Lance says, reaching for the platter with naan in it and ripping off a piece. He pops it into his mouth and closes his eyes briefly, lashes fluttering. Keith clenches his fists under the table and thinks, a little desperately,  _ he’s probably straight he’s probably straight he’s probably straight. _

“A teacher?” he asks, and Lance opens his eyes and grins a little.

“Yeah, I’m aiming for prof although part of me does kinda like the idea of teaching younger kids too. I have lots of nieces and nephews and I love hanging out with them, plus educating the younger generation is like, super important.” Keith pinches his own thigh hard just to make sure he’s not actually dreaming. “Still, hard to shake the dream of hearing ‘Professor McClain’, you know?”

“Cool,” Keith says faintly. “Very -- very cool.”

Lance’s smile curved a little sharper, into something that more closely resembles a smirk. “An English major, you say?”

Keith feels himself flush and hopes to god it’s not too obvious. “Shut up,” he replies, rolling his eyes. “You apparently can’t read emails.”

Lance laughs, his head dropping back a little to reveal the long line of this throat. “A swift response,” he says, almost like it’s a compliment. “To be honest it’s all Pidge’s fault, for keeping me out till an ungodly hour. I didn’t even turn on the lights when I got home last night, I just took off my clothes and fell into bed.”

_ Is he saying he sleeps in his underwear? _ Keith thinks wildly, but thankfully what comes out when he opens his mouth is, “Is that who’s responsible for that drawing on the door?”

Lance rolls his eyes, but his mouth quirks up again. “Yeah, she thinks it’s funny to get me in trouble with the RA just because I accidentally told an RA in her building about the secret dog she was keeping in her room, so now we’re in an unending standoff that will probably end in one of us getting kicked out of on-campus housing.”

“There’s a lot to unpack in there,” Keith says dryly. “But I’m mostly curious about why you betrayed her. I thought secret dogs were sacred on campus.”

“The RA was cute, and I thought I could impress him with a puppy,” Lance says, shrugging a little and reaching for the naan again.

Keith’s leg spasms a little and he kicks the table by accident, jostling the silverware on top. Lance’s eyes jerk toward him in surprise, but Keith shifts purposefully in his seat, pretending he’d meant to move like that all along. When Lance turns his gaze back to the food, Keith bites his lower lip to keep from smiling too wide.

_ He said he, _ Keith thinks.  _ I didn’t just make that up. _

“What was it like doing study abroad?” Lance asks, startling Keith out of his slightly overwhelmed thoughts. “I’ve always wanted to but I think I’d be too homesick to spend an entire semester too far away from home.”

“It was great,” Keith says, leaning back comfortably in his seat. He feels as if a switch has been flipped, or a barrier lifted; if they have nothing else in common, they have this -- and Lance is nice to look at, and at the very least has good taste in Indian restaurants, so this might not be a terrible semester after all. He even finds he misses Japan a little less, so it’s easy to say, “I actually went there to have the opportunity to trace some of my family roots. So it was kind of the opposite of homesick for me.”

“Whoa,” Lance says, eyes widening. “So you have family over there?”

“Kinda distant at this point, since most of them migrated to America, but yeah. On my dad’s side I’d never been before, and Shiro’s family -- he’s a friend -- offered to look after me while I was over there and show me around, so it just seemed like a good idea.”

“That’s really cool,” Lance says, grinning. He opens his mouth to say something else, but a waiter comes up to take their order and they both fumble for the menus. Lance spouts off a dish that he seems familiar with, but Keith has to desperately point at something and hope it’s not too hot -- he likes spicy food well enough, considering part of his family is Korean, but he’s not looking to embarrass himself in front of Lance just yet.

As soon as the waiter is gone Lance asks Keith about the tattoo on his wrist (the silhouette of the moon) and Keith counters by asking about the pictures of the beach in their room, and they swap questions back and forth that way for the next hour and a half, working their way through several more plates of naan and carefully transferred bites of each other’s food.

By the end of the night, walking back to their room with his hands in his pockets and Lance’s shoulder brushing his own, Keith can’t quite hide the smile on his face. Lance nudges him with every step, and Keith nudges back, and it feels -- good.

 

.

 

A list of things that Keith learns about Lance in the two weeks of living together:

 

  * He listens to classical music and hip hop in equal measure while studying, always with the sound turned up loud enough that Keith could probably sing along without Lance ever knowing.
  * His best friends are Pidge and Hunk, who show up at the dorm room enough that they kinda become Keith’s friends too. The first time they meet, Hunk, an engineering major, offers to help Keith with his math classes while holding out a container filled with freshly baked chocolate chips. Keith silently begins to plot a way to steal Hunk just in case the roommate situation doesn’t work out after all.
  * Lance _loves_ his family. He calls his mother once a week on Friday afternoons like clockwork, telling her how his classes have gone and what he’s doing over the weekend, but he receives and sends calls and messages to his whole family constantly. Keith learns that Lance already has a niece and nephew, that his _abuelita_ was the one who inspired him to go into teaching, that his sisters (pictured on the beach in his photographs) will tease him for just about anything but are also fiercely protective of him. Half of the people he talks to demand to speak to Keith as well, and Lance dutifully puts them on speakerphone so Keith can awkwardly introduce himself and listen to whoever is speaking both offer a warm greeting and then immediately turn to affectionately joking about Lance. Lance’s mother offers to send him something in the care package she’s making for Lance, and when Keith hesitates to accept, she says, humor in her voice, “I wasn’t really asking you, Keith. Any friend of Lance’s is a friend of the family, so don’t let him forget to give it to you when it arrives.” “I forgot to give Pidge some _pastelitos de guayaba_ my _tía_ Rosa sent _one time_ and she acts like I’m the most forgetful person in the world,” Lance complains.
  * Lance loves sweets and caffeine, and he’s a little picky about both of them. He might drink Starbucks in a pinch, but he prefers a coffee shop on Poplar street, and any chocolate he eats needs to have a little bit of salt in it. 
  * He stresses about school to a ridiculous degree. Keith’s grown up around Shiro and Adam, so he thought he knew about overacheiving academics, but Lance might actually be worse than them. If he’s not actively studying for something, he’s working on study guides for future tests or preemptively planning papers he has. He tells Keith one night while applying little colored tabs to one of his textbooks that he has ADHD, so he has to go to extra lengths to make sure he stays on top of his work.
  * He wears the snapbacks a lot. They look...cute on him.
  * He and Hunk are really good at football, while Pidge is not, but now that there are four of them Lance and Hunk both demand they play in teams. Lance usually calls Keith being on his team before they even get down to the frozen field outside of their dorm -- Keith’s stomach almost always does the twisty thing.
  * In fact, most things Lance does makes Keith stomach do the twisty thing: brushing his teeth with his phone in his hand, spending an inordinate amount of time fussing with his hair, falling asleep with his mouth open and a book on his chest, laughing at something his niece has said over the phone, balancing a football on his knee, humming along to whatever song he’s listening to -- Keith loses track of everything. The list is too long to count. It could probably, terrifyingly be summed up as: Lance.



 

.

 

The door slams closed, and Keith glances up from his book to see Lance storming into the room, his mouth turned down into a scowl and his feet heavy on the ground. 

“You okay?” Keith asks, slotting a finger into the crease of the book. Lance shrugs his backpack off onto the floor, toeing off his shoes in two jerky motions.

“The TA in my Econ class is unbearable,” Lance grits out, pacing across the room to sit at his desk, only to stand up abruptly one moment later. “His comments on papers are less than useless! I don’t even know why I bother to go to class, it’s all powerpoints and lines copied straight from the book because the prof is too busy with his upper level classes to even bother with us--”

He stops talking all at once, his face flushing. “Sorry. I know you don’t care.”

“I get it,” Keith says, shrugging a shoulder. “I took econ in Japan just to get it out of the way, Shiro warned me the department here is less than stellar.”

“I’m so jealous,” Lance groans, settling onto his bed. “Do you think I can just get you to teach me instead?”

“I already ejected all of that information from my brain,” Keith replies, returning idly to  _ The Moonstone _ .

“Of course you did,” Lance says, almost sounding fond. He leans back onto his bed, his head falling on his pillow, then makes a thoughtful noise. He turns over onto his stomach, fishing around under the pillow, and Keith focuses so intently on his book that his eyes almost cross.

“What is this -- wait.” Lance pulls out a candy bar from under his pillow, turning to look at Keith with raised brows. “Did you get me this?” His eyes are dancing behind his glasses, his mouth slowly curving at the edges.

“Maybe,” Keith replies, flicking a glance up at him, trying to look nonchalant. Lance’s mouth splits into a full grin, and Keith adds on, “I knew you had econ today and I figured you might want a pick me up.”

“This is my favorite candy bar,” Lance tells him, as if Keith wasn’t already intimately aware of far too many of Lance’s preferences for someone who’d only lived with him for a few weeks. “You got me my favorite candy bar,” he says, almost to himself.

“It cost me like a dollar,” Keith says dryly, but truthfully he’s savoring the pleased expression on Lance’s face, the way he holds the candy bar almost gently before setting it on his desk.

“Don’t try to undermine the moment, Keith,” Lance says, pointing at him. “This is a beautiful gesture and I’m going to treat it as such. Do you know what this means?”

“I thought I did, but now I’m not so sure,” Keith says, deadpan.

“This means  _ war _ ,” Lance says ominously. “I’m not going to be outdone by you.”

“You were a drama kid in high school, weren’t you?” Keith says.

 

.

 

Keith comes back to the dorm the next afternoon to find a box of his favorite tea on his desk, topped by a pretty pink bow. 

He tries to fight the urge to escalate, but -- backing down from a challenge has never been in his blood.

Besides, he should put his useless and ridiculous (and growing) list of Lance-related knowledge to  _ some _ kind of use, right? Showering Lance with gifts under the guise of competing to be the best roommate was probably the best outcome all things considered. He sits down at his desk and opens his laptop, starting a new word document with a grin.

 

.

 

Keith gives Lance a new football a few days later. Lance responds by ordering Chinese from Keith’s favorite takeout place, getting extra fried rice just so Keith will have leftovers. Keith retaliates by getting Lance a huge package of organizational supplies for his studies, with the added bonus that the majority of them are blue, which is his favorite color. And somehow they just -- don't stop doing things like that, back and forth, an endless loop of surprises and gifts.

“I don’t get this,” Shiro says.

Keith kicks his feet over the edge of the couch, tilting his head back to stare upside down at Shiro, who has a puzzled expression on his face.

“What are you talking about?” he asks.

“You and Lance, doing this back and forth gift-giving thing,” Shiro says, brow furrowed.

“It’s called courtship, Takashi,” Adam calls from the kitchen, flour up to his elbows as he kneads a lumpy ball of dough. Keith sits up straight again just to scowl at him as Shiro bursts into laughter.

“It is  _ not _ , it’s called being a good roommate,” Keith snaps, which just makes Adam scoff and Shiro laugh harder.

“Keith, Takashi and I started out as roommates too, but I can guarantee you we didn’t start giving each other presents until like, the third month of dating.”

Shiro finally stops laughing long enough to say, “Keith, the most you ever got Matt was like, a box of paperclips!”

“He really needed those and I was already at the store,” Keith mutters. He can feel a flush crawling across his face, because he knows, he  _ knows _ they’re right and that he’s being stupidly obvious about what he’s doing, but hearing it out loud is a totally different thing.

“You guys are already halfway through the semester, surely this can’t go on indefinitely,” Adam says, brow furrowed. “One of you is going to break eventually.”

“He doesn’t like me like that,” Keith says, trying not to sound as miserable as he feels about that. It’s something he’s become more and more sure of the longer they live together. Lance is open about who he finds attractive, gushes to Keith or even to their faces if they’re nearby. His face goes warm and bright whenever he likes someone -- he once spent ten minutes telling Keith about one of his exes, how cool and smart and pretty she was, but they’d realized a couple of months into dating that they were better as friends, and Keith just -- Lance has never, ever looked that way at him.

“Keith, he sent you flowers in class today,” Adam says, rolling his eyes. 

“That was a joke,” Keith says, rolling his eyes right back. “I told him I didn’t like the color orange and he was kidding around with me.” The bouquet of orange roses sits on the counter nearby, complete with glass jar and a pale cream bow; Keith isn’t sure if he should leave it here in Shiro’s apartment or take it back to the dorm with him. Taking it back to their room would feel -- too revealing, somehow. Like, what if Lance expected for him to throw them away because it was all just a joke, but Keith kept them and made it weird?

He really doesn’t want to make it weird.

This strange back and forth between them is the only way Keith can get out the things he’s been keeping bottled inside of him -- every time he wanted to brush Lance’s hair out of his eyes, he could get Lance a headband for when he applied his face masks; if he wanted to reach out and take hold of Lance’s hand, he could buy him a cup of coffee to keep his hand occupied instead. It’s a little pathetic, sure, but it was nice to see Lance’s face light up, to pretend that the things Lance got for him in return had the same sentiment behind them.

“Oh, Keith,” Shiro says, no longer sounding amused. He sounds almost pitying. “Do you really think that?”

“You guys don’t understand,” Keith says, crossing his arms and slumping back down on the couch. “It’s just -- it’s our thing, it’s fine. We’re just having fun.”

Adam makes a soft clicking noise with his tongue, and Shiro reaches out and puts a hand on Keith’s shoulder, brow furrowed.

“Keith, c’mon, if you really like him you should just--”

“We’re roommates, Shiro,” Keith interrupts loudly, shouldering Shiro’s hand off. “And I have to live with him for another two months, and I don’t want to spend the rest of that time with him awkwardly trying to tiptoe around my dumb feelings for him, so I’m going to take what I can and I’ll just room with Matt again next year and that’ll be it, okay? Two more months and it’ll be over.”

There’s silence in the apartment, even the rhythmic sounds of kneading gone still, and Keith closes his eyes and imagines wrapping his hands around his heart and squeezing, pushing the overflowing feelings back into shape and normalcy, shoving words back into his mouth.

Shiro leans back in his chair, an inscrutable expression on his face. “Okay,” he say softly, and the sound of kneading starts up again, and Adam brings up one of his students who’d fallen asleep in class, and they move on.

Keith leaves the roses at their apartment, and avoids Lance’s eyes when he laughingly asks if Keith had thrown them out immediately.

 

.

 

“Lance, have you seen my--”

“It’s on your desk,” Lance says, tapping away at his laptop, and Keith sighs in relief as he spots his hair tie next to his stack of books on his desk.

“Thanks,” he says, stretching it out and pulling his hair up into a messy bun.

“It’s really freaky how you guys do that,” Pidge comments from her perch on the floor, her own computer in her lap.

“Do what?” Lance asks absently, still typing.

“Know what the other one is thinking,” Hunk replies, from Lance’s bed, scribbling some kind of complicated formula. “It took me and Lance years to be able to do that, but you guys just do it. The other day I saw Keith reach for a book Lance needed for class before Lance could even open his mouth.”

Pidge snorts and Keith feels his face flush a little, his mouth curving into a frown automatically.

“We live together,” Keith says, glancing at Lance. His stomach does a familiar twist when he finds Lance already staring at him, and he drops his gaze quickly back to his book. “It just happens.”

“Mmhmm,” Pidge says, skepticism evident in her voice, but Hunk clears his throat pointedly and looks at her until she rolls her eyes and goes back to whatever she was working on.

“They just have terrible roommates, so they don’t get it,” Lance says idly, sending Keith a bright grin. “Sometimes things just work out, right?”

“Right,” Keith says, returning his smile and internally basking in the warm expression on Lance’s face.

“By next fall you guys will probably be able to read each other’s minds, huh?” Hunk asks, chuckling, and the warmth immediately turns to ice. Keith’s fingers flex on his book, his gaze dropping as Lance laughs.

“We’ll only use our superpowers for good, not evil,” Lance promises. “Like, Keith and I will become vigilantes who save freshmen in the stacks or something.”

“I could see that from Keith,” Pidge muses, “but I don’t know if Lance has it in him to be honest.”

“Hey!” Lance protests, throwing a pen at her.

Keith laughs along with Hunk, but it feels hollow, because now he can’t keep putting off talking about rooming with Lance again next year -- now he has to explain that he  _ can’t _ , that there’s no way he could make it a full year in the same room with Lance without spontaneous combustion or a mental breakdown occurring first, and he has to figure out a way to do it without sounding like an asshole.

When he risks looking up again, Lance is looking at him with narrowed eyes;  _ he can tell _ , Keith thinks, feeling a rush of blood to his face.  _ He really can read my mind. _

But Lance doesn’t say anything, just looks back down at his computer, and Keith goes back to staring at his book and pretending to read.

 

.

 

He wakes to the sound of the shower running.

It’s almost a joke between them at this point, Lance taking a shower first thing in the morning knowing that Keith will complain and Lance will make it up to him with a cup of tea. Keith stares up at the ceiling of their room, the little glowing stars that Lance put up above his bed and spread across to Keith’s side as well, and realizes that he’s smiling.

Which means that Adam was right.

Somehow he’d become kind of a morning person.

Ugh.

He rolls over in bed and picks up his phone, scrolling through his messages, checking the news sites, checking his email. He marks several of them as read without opening them, flicking past advertisements and classmates begging for notes from missed classes without really focusing on them, so he almost misses the email from the floor’s RA.

_ Hey Lance, I’m copying Keith on this as well, but after talking with the hall manager it does look like you two will be able to get the same room next semester! You’ll just need to fill out the housing documents and hand them in at least a month before the new school year starts. If you have any questions you can come find me or email the head of housing at… _

The door to the bathroom opens up while Keith is still staring at his phone, and he looks up and feels like he’s been hit with deja vu. Lance is standing framed in the yellow light of the bathroom, a towel slung around his waist and another around his neck, water dripping down the side of his face and shoulders.

_ Legs, _ Keith thinks, but also:  _ Blue eyes and warm smile and funny and smart and kind and thoughtful and I can’t do this-- _

“Hey,” Lance says, patting at his damp hair with the towel and smiling crookedly, “did you want that breakfast tea you like so much or maybe jasmine--”

“I don’t think we can live together next year,” Keith blurts out.

The sound of water dripping to the floor is absurdly loud in the silence that follows. Lance stares at him with wide eyes and a blank expression on his face, his arms at his side and the edges of his mouth slowly dropping, and Keith stares back as his heart pounds hard in his chest.

Lance says, voice quiet, “I don’t understand.”

“Lance--” Keith says, trying to look calm, trying for a weak smile, “I just--”

“I knew you looked weird the other day,” Lance continues, his voice small but hard, “but I told myself it was because of the dumb joke about saving kids in the stacks, I didn’t think you actually -- what did I  _ do _ ?”

His voice actually cracks, and it stabs Keith in the chest like an actual knife, wrenching him out of bed so that he’s standing in front Lance before he even realizes it, hands on wet shoulders, holding him in place.

“It has nothing to do with you,” Keith says, tightening his grip when Lance tries to look away. “Lance, seriously, I love being your roommate, it doesn’t have anything to do with you, it’s--”

“Oh, so we’re going with the whole, it’s not you it’s me thing,” Lance says, pulling away from with a quick jerky motion and grabbing for the clothes he’d laid out on his bed. “Don’t bother, I should have known this would happen, I shouldn’t have--”

He stops talking abruptly, just swallows and casts a quick glance at Keith before turning around and heading back into the bathroom. The door doesn’t quite slam (Lance is too considerate of the other people living on their floor to do that) but it closes with enough force that Keith winces. Before he can say anything else, he hears the door lock for the first time since he started living in this room.

His stomach twists.

Keith stands in the middle of the room, his hands still slightly damp from Lance’s skin, and closes his eyes. He sits on his bed, curling his toes against the cold floor. From the bathroom there’s the soft shuffling sound of Lance getting dressed, the thud of a hand on the counter.

He thinks of Shiro saying, exasperated and worried,  _ if you really like him you should just-- _

He doesn’t know how long he sits there, listening to the sound of water dripping in the bathroom, the distant coughing of some other student on their floor, the thudding of his own heart. He feels a calmness settle over him, foreign and tired.

The bathroom door opens, and Keith looks up at Lance and says, “I like you.”

Lance hasn’t even really stepped out of the bathroom, his hand still on the door handle, his mouth halfway open as if he were about to say something himself. He doesn’t look -- he doesn’t look mad, just confused, so Keith steels himself and continues,

“So that’s why I don’t think we should live together. Because -- because I like you. And you don’t--”

“Keith,” Lance interrupts, “shut up.”

Keith’s mouth closes with a soft clicking noise.

Lance hasn’t bothered to style his hair, so it hangs limply down into his eyes. It’s why Keith can’t see the expression on his face until he hears the humor in Lance’s voice when he says, “I guess we aren’t ready to be vigilantes after all.”

“What?” Keith asks, brows furrowing.

“We obviously can’t read each other’s minds at all,” Lance says, and now he looks up properly at Keith, and he  _ is _ smiling, and his eyes are so warm that Keith can feel the heat of it all the way across the room. “If we could, you’d know that I like you too.”

Keith stares at him, uncomprehending for a moment. The smile on Lance’s face fades a little, his head tilting.

“Uh,” Lance says uncertainly, “Keith? Did you hear me?”

“Are you making fun of me?” Keith asks, and it comes out sharper than he means it to, but his pulse is starting to quicken in his chest, and he can feel hope swelling like a balloon inside of him, choking out the unhappiness and fear.

“Most of the time,” Lance says, shrugging his shoulders with a crooked smile, “but not about this. Keith, I’ve liked you since you got me that candy bar after my econ class.”

"But that was months ago!” Keith protests.

“Yeah, and?”

“I would have known,” Keith says. Lance stares at him like he's grown a second head, and he adds, feeling impossibly stupid, “You’ve never been shy about saying when you think someone is cute, or funny, and I’m nothing like your exes and I just--”

“Keith, I’m not gonna crush on my roommate to his face,” Lance says, rolling his eyes. “It’s not like you were confessing to  _ me-- _ ”

“I practically was,” Keith argues. “My friends were ragging on me about how obvious I was being, Lance, I bought you a  _ ring _ \--”

“It was candy!”

“There was sentiment behind it!” Keith says. “And I don’t make breakfast for just anyone, okay, or buy face masks, or--”

“And I don’t buy roses for just anyone!” Lance counters. “Or books by their favorite poet, or canvases and art supplies, or--”

Both of them fall quiet at the same time, chests heaving, faces flushed, and Keith realizes at some point, he’s stood up. They’re standing only about a foot apart, and past the giddy rush that always comes from playfully arguing with Lance, he can feel the stomach twisting he always feels around Lance, and--

Lance _ likes _ him. He likes Keith, and they’re arguing about liking each other, and -- it’s ridiculous. It’s amazing. It’s --  _ them _ .

Lance seems to be following a similar thought process, because he starts to laugh a little, then a lot, and before long both of them are nearly bent in half, stifling choked giggles. Lance’s hand catches on Keith’s waist, and Keith curls his finger around Lance’s wrist, and slowly, carefully, their laughter dissolves into breathlessness.

Their eyes meet, and Lance’s dip down to his mouth briefly, then back up, and Keith is tired of pushing aside the things he wants to do, so he leans up and presses their mouths together.

Lance is warm under his hands and mouth, still flushed with the heat of his shower and their argument, loose and firm at the same time. He kisses Keith back immediately, his hand tightening on Keith’s waist, and the stomach twisting comes back in full force, fluttering inside of him, pulsing in his wrists and throat and chest.

And above it all, Keith just -- feels right. Kissing Lance feels as simple and as easy as everything else has been, feels like coming back to the room to a cup of tea waiting for him, or finding the perfect socks to go with Lance’s new shoes, or falling asleep to the gentle sound of tapping keys. It feels like coming home.

When they fall apart again, Keith keeps his eyes closed just a moment to savor the feeling, to commit to memory. Lance’s breath is hot against his cheek, but neither of them speak, letting the silence continue, just basking in each other’s presence.

Then Lance says, “But seriously, it should have been obvious I liked you.”

Keith snaps his eyes open and scowls up at Lance. “It should have been obvious  _ I  _ liked you! You’re the one who’s always open with his feelings, how was I supposed to know?”

“You’re the English and Art major! You should be able to see romance--”

“Okay, I've liked you longer so you should have had more time--”

“Wait, really?” Lance asks, a smirk tugging at his mouth. His eyebrows wiggle up and down, teasing. “When did you start to like me, then?”

Keith groans, rolling his eyes, then tugs Lance down and kisses him again just to keep the grin from taking over his face. Lance subsides quickly, letting go of Keith’s waist to bury his hands in his hair, tilting his head back at an angle so they’re pressed more tightly together.

Keith lets himself feel a little smug -- it’s rare that he wins their arguments, but he feels like he might have a new weapon in his arsenal.

And he makes a mental note not to forget his housing papers for next year -- although he has a feeling he won’t have a problem remembering any more.

  
  
  
  


**Author's Note:**

> I hope you liked the fic, thank you for reading! You can find me on tumblr at [apvrrish](http://apvrrish.tumblr.com) or on twitter at [apvrrish](http://twitter.com/apvrrish).


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